I wonder where Savannah is now. No, not the city. We all know to go east on Interstate 10 until you hit water and then turn left into Georgia to get there. And no, Savannah isn’t a cute, little country gal with a sunny smile and freckles, though we do have plenty of those around here.

This Savannah is a 460-pound immature great white shark which cruised Florida’s gulf coast waters back in February. She reached as far north as Tampa before reversing to backtrack around the peninsula and up the Eastern Seaboard. Researchers last received her signal from off the coast of North Carolina. While she was very close to where she’d originally been tagged in March 2017, she’d swum almost 5,300 miles since then.

A great white shark nicknamed Savannah ventured off the coast of St. Lucie County Jan. 9, 2018.(Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO FROM OCEARCH)

Then, there’s Harvey, a mature shortfin mako shark weighing in at a svelte 250 pounds. He was originally tagged off the coast of Corpus Christi, Texas, in April 2016 and has traveled more than 14,000 miles. His route takes him across the Gulf of Mexico, down to the Caribbean Sea and back. Now, Harvey’s been tagged twice as long, and mako sharks are supposed to be some of the fastest swimming sharks in the Gulf of Mexico, but still. That’s a long way to go in two years.

Our oceans are full of life. Considering that we’ve explored only 5-10 percent of them, we certainly don’t have a true grasp on the life contained within. Savannah and Harvey can help provide some of this missing information. Knowing more about their species might lead to important discoveries about other marine life forms.

OCEARCH is the organization which studies these sharks. It then provides this data to researchers and conservationists who work to protect our waters. One of its wins involved the data its scientists gathered while on an expedition to the Galapagos in 2014. This information was in part responsible for the current ban on long-line fishing within the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

Savannah and Harvey are only two of the many sharks studied by OCEARCH. They’re special to us, because they obviously like it here, too. You can track them in almost-real time at OCEARCH.org, if you’d like to check it out. There are a lot of other cool facts about all the sharks and their travels, too.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Savannah and Harvey through this shark tracker. It can only receive signals when the animals are at the surface, and there’s no telling when that might be. It’s really too bad. I’d love to know the moment they make contact with that alien race living on the ocean floor. What? You didn’t know?